My mother asked me the other weekend if I wanted to have children. In a more politicised time, this question to a gay son would probably have caused bitter rows. But nowadays it seems fair enough - I had just been telling her that two of my friends from school were both starting families, and so it followed naturally in the conversation that she asked if I was planning to have any. I just said no, emphatically, and that was it. We changed the subject, no upset or hard feelings.

Yesterday, Stephen Daldry revealed he had recently got married, and again, there seemed to be no upset, no hard feelings. Long presumed to be gay, the director of Billy Elliot married a woman, known only to the public as Lucy, "his long-term girlfriend in New York", not long after the September 11 attacks. Years ago, when gay rights were still an issue, the news would have seen him vilified as a traitor to the cause. It happened to Tom Robinson, the musician who sang Glad To Be Gay in the late 70s, but by the start of the 90s had got his female partner pregnant.

And when Elton John married, eyebrows were raised as closet doors seemed to slam firmly shut. But now that Bob and Rose, the recent drama about a gay man falling for a woman, can find a home on primetime TV, Daldry's announcement will not be met with polemics.

Indeed, most will find the marriage of the former artistic director of the Royal Court a particularly entertaining piece of gossip. They will laugh at the 41-year-old's very Oprah-like explanation ("It was one of those moments when you have to decide and focus your life and take positive action when everything else seems to be falling apart"); they will wonder if the couple will now try to adopt Jamie Bell, the 15-year-old star of Billy Elliot who, in a recent BBC documentary, appeared to spend more time with Daldry than with his mother.

But they won't get angry, because gay men no longer need figureheads to act in a certain way. Indeed, in what is left of the gay community, the only politics are personal ones, about being accountable to lovers, friends and yourself.

It is now taken for granted that most gay men have slept with women in their time. Usually it is as teenagers, sometimes unaware or unaccepting of their homosexuality, but often only because they are stuck at school, desperate for sex and not yet acquainted with anyone else who's gay.

You'd be hard pushed to find yourself a partner who had been exclusively gay all their life, but as long as their straight experiments are safely in the past, it's not a problem. For most gay men, it only becomes an issue when they sleep with women in the present, especially because, since homosexuality as a militant issue has waned, the word bisexuality is seen as a slur. No one wants to be called it. As Michael Stipe famously put it, "I'm not homosexual, I'm not heterosexual, I'm sexual". This week, the assumed-to-be-lesbian comedian Jackie Clune said that even though she is currently with her first male lover, "I would never say I was bisexual. I hate the label: it's naff, it smacks of key-swapping fondue parties".

It means that after years of struggle for recognition, gay men and women are now denying the labels they once fought for to become part of everyday life. When I was 18, then still under the age of consent, the issue was about whether being gay was genetic or a choice. It was a vital debate at the time since those who argued for the latter usually believed that homosexuals had opted for an easy life of wanton hedonism, and therefore did not deserve to be rewarded with gay sex being legal at 16.

But that all seems to have gone out of the window - Daldry talks of "focus" and "positive action" suggests that he's made a choice. He's had male lovers, he's had female lovers. He's not known to call himself bisexual, but he's decided to take the path of convention, even though he will obviously never want or be able to call himself straight. Of course what he does is his business. And it certainly won't harm him in Hollywood to have a female partner on his arm. But what gay men do in their private lives no longer seems to matter so much in a wider social context.

It is only important in the same way it is for your straight friends - are they happy with their partner, have they made the right choices, are they longing for more commitment, are they satisfied with their lives? Most gay men will say they are fine as they are, and that they went through all these issues - understanding they won't have kids, won't get married, won't have a family - when they came to terms with their homosexuality. Most expect to live their lives with none of this ever changing.

But Daldry's announcement is a sign that a growing number of gay men see their sexuality as a short-term option, forever subject to alteration according to whim, age or social position. We may think of Daldry as gay, but he sees himself as something entirely different.

He claims that having children was not the motivating force, but most gay men will probably see the pull of offspring as the reason it's all happened. But this suspicion will only be a casual one, something that causes wry amusement and little else. They don't care if he goes straight, they just wonder if he's realised what he'll be missing.